From othering to m/othering - the dynamics of love in professional therapeutic practice.
Val looked anxiously at Grace. She didn’t usually talk about her work in this way; it was too woolly and fluffy for most people. Most professionals who commissioned her work wanted clear outcomes and goals set at the start of the intervention. Saying “I just want him to fall in love” didn’t fall into the category of professional discourse.
“So how do you do that?” Grace really wanted to know.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 70.
Dear all,
Firstly, happy new year. When I looked back at my journal for January 2022, I was surprised to see that as lead for a course training psychotherapeutic counsellors, we were making the decision to keep the first three sessions of the year online due to Covid-19. In my doctoral thesis, I proposed that forgetfulness is an essential part of caring. This grew from how I forgot the pain of labour and delivery in the engrossment of care for the infant. Is that an experience shared by all who give birth (unless the birth itself was traumatic)? Would we ever go on to have more than one baby if we didn’t forget?
Without revisiting my journal, I would have forgotten the daily painful decisions we were making about whether it was safer to remain apart from each other even though that was so counter to the embodied nature of our training. But just as with the birthing of a child, even if the pain of labour is forgotten, there is a product of that labour: the infant. In our education of therapeutic practitioners, although we forget the pain of the decisions we were having to make during Covid, there has been a product of that pain that, like the infant, must be attended to so that the growth and development of practitioners can once again find the best conditions to flourish. Despite our resilience, Covid has a legacy that still impacts on us as people, therapist educators, and practitioners. I think it has a particular impact on our practice of Theraplay because it draws so directly on those very early infancy embodied experiences that build attachment – proximity, touch, and physical coregulation through attuned care.
When Grace asked Val - “How do you do that?”, wanting to know how Val uses her Theraplay practice to enable Joe to ‘fall in love’, it is these fundamental, lived experiences of attachment she is asking about. Not a theory, but the embodied experience.
How does this falling in love happen?
It is possible to go down the route of looking at how oxytocin is produced, which helps a mother fall in love with the infant. It is possible to go down the route of thinking about genetic compatibility as to why two people might be drawn together sexually, and produce an infant. Both are valid and true from the position of seeing science as the dominant knowledge form that ‘must’ inform what we do in the Theraplay session. Personally, however, I feel reduced by that way of understanding what happens inside of me when I am greeted with the loveliness of a baby smiling back at me.
Yes, people can argue that such a view is personal, individual, and about me. I would counter that by pointing out that it is me - my individual way of being - that is in the room with the children and families I work with. It is through my personal way of being me-who-cares, through working really hard to attune to the individual, their necessary life-story, and the defences that arise from that, through my own vulnerable not-knowing-until-I-try sensitivity to the other, that we can find the cracks between us where the love can flow.*
I felt very vulnerable in choosing to focus on a central concept of love in my academic and clinical work. In a domain of knowledge that wants ‘evidence’, that wants ways of knowing that cleave to understandings of a singular truth, that desires certainty and mistrusts the vulnerability that comes from not being sure what you are doing, who in their right mind would write a thesis titled “What did I do? I don’t know.”!
I would have felt far more comfortable with certainty. Following protocol in therapy, and more mainstream methodologies in research, would relieve my sense of vulnerability. If I followed protocol, stuck to the manualised models of work and mainstream patterns of research, and there was no change for a client, then I’d have covered my back. The conclusion would have to be that there is nothing that can alleviate their suffering, and that it’s because the clients, are too messed up, or haven’t been ready or able to make use of my skills, that they are not cured. Othering has occurred.
Ethically and morally, that sits so uncomfortably with me. I am asking the children and families I work with to be vulnerable and allow change. If I am not prepared to go to that place too, what does that say of me? Isn’t that one of those Milgram moments that I talked about last month? That then leads me to wonder – is love, offered without vulnerability from both parties, a form of control? What did the fiction reflect to me by capturing my tacit knowledge about love and vulnerability? How does that help me theorise the dynamics of love to make sense of how we can appropriately use practitioner vulnerability to facilitate the development of the children and families we work with, and to alleviate suffering?
Milo does want to love both his adoptive mother and his wife, but it never quite works because he can’t let go of his need to be the person in control, because that would expose his vulnerability (p55). Joe’s foster mum has to let him go to preserve the love between them, both of them acknowledging that she was vulnerable to Joe’s aggressive way of working through his fear (p.9).
As I pondered the meaning of the fiction in the technical document that accompanied it, I found that as the tacit knowing emerged into tacit knowledge, I had to find words to convey experience. You will have picked up from the length of these posts that I can be a bit wordy as I struggle to convert felt senses into the two dimensions of words on a page. One of the words I adopted as a ‘shortcut to long meaning’ was m/othering.
M/othering: experience and knowledge held tacitly and culturally dismissed as non-knowledge (as I suggested last month), knowledge that for me was bound up in the actual physical mothering of the infants that it was my privilege and joy to be part of bringing into the world.
This became a term to specifically focus on the shift from exclusion, from one group or person holding power over another, from othering as de Beauvoir (and others) use the term, to something that is an intentional and theorised loving action, m/othering.
In my quest not to other, to seek to use my power as a professional in the service of someone else, certain words in my professional vocabulary were amended and elaborated:
Client became ‘person who is cared about’
Relational and developmental trauma became ‘a person who is experiencing the effects of relational and developmental trauma’
In our pressured, time-driven culture, slowing down and expanding terms seemed to connect me in a different way to an idea or experience, and also re-presented to me the humane-ness of Theraplay. Breaking words apart makes it possible to consider what they mean experientially, not just cognitively. Being slow, long-winded, and descriptive became an ethical, moral, and relational powerhouse. It meant I could explore how I bring my vulnerability to the work and offer that in the service of the other. It meant I could take time to put myself in the position of the other and deepen my empathy for their necessary life-story. It meant I could elaborate and tentatively propose ancient knowledge in a new way that might make sense to Theraplay practitioners - and indeed psychotherapeutic practitioners from other modalities - to find ways that we could stay in touch with the people we professionally care about in our practice and not foreclose on our endeavours to alleviate suffering when our manualised starting points for work don’t fit the needs of the people who we are caring about. The driver to our action is love and care.
So, enough expansive wittering - what did emerge about the theorisation of dynamics of love in Theraplay?
Through the exploration of knowledge reflected back to me via the tacit knowing exposed by the fiction, I came to see that I engage with children who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma with skills that I used in caring for infants during the first five weeks of life.
Five weeks is a bit of a notional time. Reverse engineering my knowledge from experience – that is to say, looking to see if the literature said anything that supports my tacit knowing that it is the first five weeks of development we are working with – some literature does support the idea. Vanderijt and Plooji (2013), in their very practical parenting book based on their academic writings, suggest five weeks is a ‘first fussy point’, or a point where there is a significant spurt of development that puts a level of strain on the infant, hence they can be a bit miserable. My other go-to people, Sunderland (2006), Stern (2006), Brazelton (2006), Porges (2011), Gerhardt (2004) didn’t seem to identify this as a highly significant stage in the development.
I see this developmental point as the onset of intentional interdependence on the part of the infant. It is an essential building block of a concept of self-in-relationship. For me, as a mother, my children learning to smile seemed to connect with their intentional initiation of play between us. Relational interdependence, as different to dependence, comes from muscular control, the initiation of a smile for example. Hence, on the part of the less mobile, less powerful infant, muscular intentionality becomes part of relational interdependence.
Is this correct? I invite those of you who have mothered (no matter your gender) to go inwards and explore your own experience of those first five weeks. Is what I write resonating with you? Is it like that for you too? This is the way we develop our practice-based evidence to add weight to the research into the theorisation of our practice. Is this a way you check out my tacit knowledge, given the gap that there seems to be in the literature?
So what do you do in the first five weeks as a mother?
The infant is undoubtedly a social actor (Nagy 2008), but is limited by the immaturity of their muscular control, sensory development, and limited endurance at a physical level. Without the mother initiating response to the infant's nascent survival/relational signals, there is distress followed by collapse – think about the still face videos. I call this the pre-mobile-play stage.
In this pre-mobile-play stage, the mother carefully and minutely tracks the infant's engagement with the world. The mother learns the infant. The maternal action - responding to a cry, for example - will take on different meanings in different circumstances. The mother may discern the required attenuated response to the cry from its quality, or the movement of the infant, or how it leaves her feeling inside. The mother probably wouldn’t be able to verbalise how they know, they just know – they act, and adapt their actions if required. These are the countless faithful repetitions of the bodily action of mothering that build up tacit knowing and are required before the infant is mobile and able to bodily initiate relationship via actions themselves. The first stage of this is gaining the motor skills to smile. In the pre-mobile play stage, the mother tentatively, with observation and getting-it-wrong-and-putting-it-rights, joins with the infant. In the first Theraplay manual, Jernberg calls this ‘intruding’. This dimension later became engagement. In the third edition, Booth talks about the need for a high level of sensitivity in Theraplay practice in the service of people experiencing the impact of trauma. By locating this as the maternal processes used in the first five weeks of an infant/mother’s life, it can be theorised and becomes m/othering. We use our professional and scholarly body-knowing (rather than a body of knowledge) to facilitate our intentional care of the people we are working with.
I theorise that much of the damage of relational trauma is because the experience of life is ‘too much’ in these first five weeks, and the only way to survive, the necessary life story, is to shut down, withdraw, and not relate (see the blog post The Life and Death of Hide and Seek).
In A Necessary Life(Story), Milo’s adopted mum becomes a husk of herself, stuck in a place of antiques. Was that the result of coercive control by Milo? Or was it him trying to love without vulnerability? In Val’s assessment of Milo: both he and his adoptive mother want to love each other and just can’t do it (p.20).
So, how do I, as a practitioner and as a person, carry on loving with vulnerability? Theory and language does help. It gives the structure. In the thesis it came down to thinking about how to use power in the service of the other, the ethics of care, and how what we do in Theraplay is about the more grown up person using that power in the service of the other, where relational development has got stuck (because of trauma) at the developmental stage of tiny vulnerable infancy. We have to take our Theraplay to that place to be exquisitely aware of not overloading very, very sensitive and vulnerable people in our desire to offer a healing relationship. In those moments of connection, we have to be both looking inwards at our own visceral response as well as looking outwards to the people we are caring about. If I gave that process a name, rather than the long-winded description, might that take you away from the minutia of having to trust the felt sense of looking inwards and looking outwards in your work?
When writing that, I mistyped ‘looking’ as ‘loving inwards and loving outwards’. Actually, when I think about it, that’s probably about right. That is how we carry on loving with vulnerability so we don’t misuse our power over people and other them. This loving inwards and loving outwards is how we professionally stay in the place of m/othering.
I wish all of you a year filled with feeling safe and being able to love inwards and love outwards.
See you next month,
Fiona Peacock
*I am indebted to Carol Holliday (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-62490005 and her work, and to my lovely students at Cambridge who have taken the notion of Kintsugi as a metaphor to celebrate vulnerability and injury as a thing of beauty and strength by letting the gold flow into the gaps.
Next month
“Joe, stop!” The TA bellowed down the hallway. Joe didn’t take a blind bit of notice. He ran straight at Val. She had just enough time to drop her bags and move the trolley to one side. Joe leapt up against her, and she had no choice but to wrap her arms around him. Instinctively, she moved her head back. She remembered when she first started this kind of work and a child excitedly leaping up, catching her under the chin and giving her concussion. Who needs a gym session with weights to keep yourself trim when there is Theraplay? She thought.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 47.
Bibliography
Beauvoir, S. de, Borde, C., Malovany-Chevallier, S., Reid, M., & Haynes, N. (2015). Extracts from the second sex.
Booth, P. B. (2010). Theraplay: Helping parents and children build better relationships through attachment-based play (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Brazelton, T. B. (2006). Touchpoints: Birth to 3: your child’s emotional and behavioral development (2nd ed.). Da Capo Lifelong Books.
Gerhardt, S. (2004). Why love matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain (1st ed). Brunner-Routledge.
Jernberg, A. M. (1979). Theraplay: A new treatment using structured play for problem children and their families. Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Nagy, E. (2008). Innate intersubjectivity: Newborns’ sensitivity to communication disturbance. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1779–1784. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012665
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Stern, D. N. (2006). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and development psychology. Karnac.
Sunderland, M. (2006). Science of parenting: Practical guidance on sleep, crying, play, and building emotional well-being for life. Dorling Kindersley.
Tomlinson, J. (2007). The culture of speed: The coming of immediacy. SAGE.
Vanderijt, H., & Plooij, F. X. (2013). The wonder weeks: How to stimulate your baby’s mental development and help him turn his 10 predictable, great, fussy phases into magical leaps forward.